A Makelight online course

You can create a great brand on a shoestring budget. You just need to get the fundamentals right

This course is co-hosted with Stef Lewandowski, who ran an award-winning design agency for ten years before joining Emily to build Makelight.

With big brand clients including Vivienne Westwood, The V&A, Red Bull, Land Rover as well as small, creative businesses, Stef has a wealth of experience to share with you.

We'll go back to first principles, establish what you, your business or your project are all about. Then we'll work through how to communicate those fundamentals to the world, whatever stage you are at. Past attendees have found Bloom useful for establishing the fundamentals, working out a name, colours, typography. Others have found it useful for re-assessing where they're at and working on a rebrand or a new direction.

You're not going to come out of this course suddenly proficient as a graphic designer, but you will know what you're about, what you and your work stands for and the themes and ideas that you want to convey to people through what you're passionate about. From that solid foundation you'll be able to work with designers and other creative people to communicate those ideas to your followers or customers.

Episodes included

Welcome to Bloom

The first lesson in Makelight's Bloom course

Your Brand Starting Point

Where are you beginning from?

Taking Stock

A lesson about taking stock of your brand

Your Bubble

Let's take a look at the brands that you associate with right now

Images That Evoke a Feeling

Let's do an image safari

Reference Points

Looking at your references

The Triple Triangle Exercise

A lesson in establishing what your brand is about

Your Essential Words

An exercise in developing those core words about what you do

Dream the dream

A slightly more relaxed exercise for you today

Distilling

Coming to some essential language you can use to describe what you're about

Ideas through Images

Communicating your distilled ideas through images

Differentiation

How to find the differences between you and others around you

Choosing a name

The first part of our choosing a name series

Considering a name

Ways to approach picking a name

Name shortlisting

Distilling down to a good name

Name picking

Deciding on a name is hard!

Customer language

A lesson about listening to your customers

Briefing a designer

How to communicate what you need from a designer

Typography

Choosing fonts for your brand can be hard. Here's how to get started

Brand colours

Using colour to represent your brand

Not just a logo

A lesson about logos, and not logos!

Brand guidelines

A description of your brand and how to make it consistent

Small launches

How launching something small now, helps you make something big later.